The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:23 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
In reply to: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix) by ajmacleod
Parent article: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

I think anyone would be hard pressed to call it 'throw[ing] the baby out with the bathwater'.

In the 26 years since X11's initial release, it's gained multi-output support (four times), multi-input-device support (three times), hotplugging for both, a new keyboard model, a compositing model, a new rendering model, direct OpenGL rendering support (twice), indirect OpenGL rendering, accelerated indirect OpenGL rendering, a new font rendering model including anti-aliasing (three-ish times), autoconfiguration support, an acceleration architecture (four-ish times), Display PostScript support (later removed), a print server (also later removed, thank god), and has been ported to everything from mobile phones to renderfarms.

So how you can essentially accuse us of not having trying, and done this frivolously, is beyond me.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 20, 2013 13:54 UTC (Thu) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (1 responses)

I didn't accuse anyone of "not trying"; I've said repeatedly that I hope Wayland does do everything X is actually used for today and does it better. I'm just a bit weary of a particular type of approach which seems quite common at the moment where a replacement for some piece of technology is wheeled out at the barely usable prototype stage, claimed to be the one true way with all that went before being completely broken and to be abandoned... while the replacement doesn't actually DO everything that its predecessor did.

Nobody has claimed that X is perfect, but I do claim that it does absolutely everything I want it to do, does it without any fuss and has done so for a decade and a half (over which time the things I've been actually using it for have changed quite a bit.) Remote X display has never, ever been a "nightmare" for me, or for anyone I know - frankly I've always considered it verging on the miraculous! If X has problems, which I'm not disputing, they're at a level where _users_ don't see them. I wish the Wayland developers all the best, and if they can make it all work as well and transparently as X currently does I'll be very happy!

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 20, 2013 15:34 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

This is all worth highlighting and is a gem of this discussion.

> technology is wheeled out at the barely usable prototype stage, claimed to be the one true way with all that went before being completely broken and to be abandoned

Some of that is just a consequence of open development, by definition you have the software before it is in a "finished" state, and see the dark corners as it is being made. Often the software isn't really "done" or "ready" until after several iterations of release, sometimes spanning years, and everyone has to suffer through the iterations until it works the way it should. See GNOME 2 and GNOME 3, they really didn't get into their stride with feature completeness until after the .8 or .10 release.

> completely broken and to be abandoned... while the replacement doesn't actually DO everything that its predecessor did

Some times things are replaced without knowing why the old thing did the things it did, google "mjg59 lighdm" for a good example of that. Unfortunately there sometimes isn't enough manpower for parallel development and maintenance.

> Remote X display has never, ever been a "nightmare" for me, or for anyone I know - frankly I've always considered it verging on the miraculous! If X has problems, which I'm not disputing, they're at a level where _users_ don't see them

And that is due to the very hard work of people like Keith Packard and Daniel Stone and all the X.org team. They have busted their butts over the years trying to make X not suck so that you and I could be blissfully unaware of the contortions and brokenness behind the scenes. It's a testament to their success and hard work that people don't believe them when they say that X11 is fundamentally broken.